At ICANN84 in Dublin, which happened in the last week of October 2025, the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and Global Partners Digital (GPD) worked together to bridge perspectives across stakeholder communities. Through closed-door and public sessions, we sought to deepen understanding of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 process, with the aim of facilitating discussions on areas of common concern between different stakeholder groups and building the foundations for coordinated advocacy in the months ahead.
On 28 October, building on over two years of GNI-facilitated cross-stakeholder dialogue and engagement on the WSIS process – including most recently through workshops at the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica) 2025, RightsCon 2025, and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2025 – and coordinating joint outputs focused on the process, GNI partnered with GPD to organise an invitation-only workshop on “Safeguarding Multistakeholder Internet Governance: Building Alliances in WSIS+20.”
Participants explored four themes that cut across these communities: connectivity and access, data governance and artificial intelligence (AI), the WSIS architecture, and human rights and the open Internet.
A full summary of the workshop can be found here.
The workshop reflected a strong convergence on the need to ground the WSIS+20 review in existing initiatives, preserve the WSIS’s inclusive multistakeholder structures, and reaffirm that human rights and an open, globally interoperable Internet remain at the heart of its vision.
This workshop was, in part, supported by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Grant Program through the Shaping the WSIS+20 Review for a Unified Internet Multistakeholderism (SWUIM) project.
To continue discussing common priorities with a broader group, GNI and GPD partnered with the ICANN Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) for a session on “Bridging Perspectives on WSIS+20 from the Technical Community and Civil Society,” as part of the ICANN84 official programme. The discussion underscored how closely intertwined issues of digital development, infrastructure integrity, and governance have become.
Farzaneh Badii (as a member of the ICANN Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group and founder of Digital Medusa) praised the efforts of the co-facilitators for the WSIS+20 process, and the UN agencies involved in the review, in running a comprehensive consultation process and engaging stakeholders. She highlighted that the Zero Draft of the WSIS+20 Review is strong and incorporates notable input from civil society. However, she also flagged that the advocacy around data localization or infrastructure control during the negotiations could inadvertently undermine the interoperable Internet that the WSIS was designed to protect. In addition, Badii mentioned that language on human rights in the Zero Draft could be usefully broadened to extend to taking a human rights approach to standards development and implementation, as well as laws to ensure a human rights-based approach to the governance of the Internet and digital technologies, encompassing broader work by stakeholders involved in Internet Governance.
Anriette Esterhuysen (as a member of the Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS and a key partner in the SWIUM project) reminded participants that for many states and stakeholders, the WSIS is fundamentally a process about digital development, noting that digital inequality remains the unfulfilled promise of the original summit. She called for renewed focus on meaningful access and on financing mechanisms that move beyond market-driven models, highlighting proposals for a taskforce to explore sustainable approaches to funding digital inclusion.
Ajith Francis (representing the Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism (TCCM)) warned of increasing policy fragmentation and the erosion of technical interoperability. He argued that only a multistakeholder model can sustain the Internet as a federated network of networks, and that the IGF should be strengthened, both financially but also in its ability to play a role in agenda-setting. Ultimately, the IGF should bridge the divide between multilateral and multistakeholder governance.
During the discussion speakers emphasized common priorities; the need to preserve the IGF’s independence, resist efforts to narrow WSIS’s and the IGF’s scope to “Internet governance” alone, and the need to ensure that digital inclusion, connectivity, and human rights, and their connection to ICT for Development (ICT4D), remain central to the review.
Throughout ICANN84, some commonalities emerged. Stakeholder communities share a deep commitment to protecting the multistakeholder governance model that has sustained the open and interoperable Internet for two decades, aligning on the importance of connectivity, access, and inclusion as the underpinning building blocks for subsequent elements of the WSIS framework, and underscoring the centrality of a human rights-based approach to the WSIS framework and action lines. The challenge now is to translate this alignment into coordinated advocacy which ensures that the WSIS+20 outcome document reaffirms human rights and multistakeholder internet governance as two of the foundational principles which will help to realize the WSIS+20 vision. In the coming weeks, the process will shift to primarily intergovernmental negotiations. As the opportunities for stakeholder engagement narrow, alignment and coordination will be more important than ever.